I work at Headshift, a social media and social computing consultancy, as a Senior Business & Technical Consultant. I've written a few things and made presentations that people find interesting. You can also follow me on Twitter. Or are you looking for my old blog?
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Hmm. I'm not entirely convinced about this, however there is an argument that if you want to ease the introduction of new information work practices into people's work routines then you need to go where the users are. I was a big fan of Xobni when I was last using Outlook regularly. However Twitter and LinkedIn are very different paradigms to integrate into Outlook - Xobni augments what you are already doing in Outlook with additional information, but tools like Twinbox (the example above) is introducing a brand new information stream in parallel to email.
I also wonder if integration with an enterprise microblogging tool might actually be the better use case for this kind of integration? For example, Socialcast is an enterprise microblogging platform and they have talked about providing plugins for Outlook and Lotus Notes (I'm not sure if they actually came to fruition).
On the other hand, Socialtext's Signals takes a non-email activity stream approach. Their desktop applications (a cross platform RIA) combines microblogging with notifications about wiki page edits, blog posts, comments, profile changes.
What do you think? Is an email client the right place for enterprise users to learn about microblogging or are we just reinforcing the email interface. Or perhaps we should just give people as much choice as possible?
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